One year after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released classified information about the agency’s electronic eavesdropping, U.S. IT vendors are still trying to respond to European privacy concerns.

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services unit, says the company is prioritizing where it locates data centers, and Germany is “one of the few countries” where customers are asking for a data center “on their own soil.”

It’s not too early for businesses to ask what they can do with unlimited computing power, writes Guest Contributor and Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty. A number of factors, from Moore’s law to the Open Compute Project to data-capturing sensors used on engine turbines, “drive home an important message: hardware is back,” he writes.

GM CIO Randall Mott says the company has ended a $3 billion outsourcing contact with Hewlett-Packard, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build its own data and innovation centers and hire almost 9,000 IT workers because “to transform the company, you really need IT, which touches all parts of the business.”

Good morning. General Motors opened a new data center Monday amid great fanfare, an official beginning of a transition begun by CIO Randy Mott, who last year announced the auto maker would stop outsourcing its IT to other companies. The new data center, modeled on architectural principles pioneered by Facebook and Google, also symbolizes a new approach toward IT. The company’s new data center has been designed to be easier to maintain and expand, and less expensive to cool than older, conventional data centers. It also supports a mixture of conventional and experimental technologies that the company hopes will measurably improve its capacity to innovate by doubling the number of IT projects it is able to undertake. But those capabilities will not transform the company unless the rest of the company undergoes an accompanying cultural shift, one that Mr. Mott says has “just begun… We believe we can grow faster with stronger IT. That is why we are making investments in our own data centers and innovation centers,” Mr. Mott told CIO Journal during an interview last week at GM’s technical center.

BY STEVEN ROSENBUSH AND JEFF BENNETTTo clear the way for the complex, located at GM’s technical center in Warren, Mich., GM had to unwind a massive IT services contract with Hewlett-Packard Co., and reverse an outsourcing model that goes back to its acquisition of EDS nearly 30 years ago. “This is a journey that has just begun. There is a lot to be learned,” CIO Randall Mott told CIO Journal.

BY STEVEN ROSENBUSH, MICHAEL HICKINS
The cloud is beginning to transform the core IT infrastructure of big corporations, for everything from testing emerging technologies to running core business applications.

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